Road Network Modeling in Open Source GIS to Manage the Navigation of Autonomous Robots

The autonomous navigation of a robot can be accomplished through the assignment of a sequence of waypoints previously identified in the territory to be explored. In general, the starting point is a vector graph of the network consisting of possible paths. The vector graph can be directly available in the case of actual road networks, or it can be modeled, i.e. on the basis of cartographic supports or, even better, of a digital terrain model (DTM). In this paper we present software procedures developed in Grass-GIS, PostGIS and QGIS environments to identify, model, and visualize a road graph and to extract and normalize sequence of waypoints which can be transferred to a robot for its autonomous navigation.